When brother and sister Brian and Berenice Usher were children, they revelled in a made up fantasy life where Berenice was actually the reincarnation of a witch who had been buried alive in a rat filled coffin, and the Midfolker, who was halfway between Suffolk and Norfolk, would stalk the land looking for victims. When their parents went out, another game they would play would be one with their pet hamster where it had to be hidden around the house, but oh dear, Brian put the animal in the blender and accidentally turned it on, liquidising it. Berenice then locked him in their large toybox for as while, as she did when he was bad, and a few hours later he was let out to see the hamster was alive again - was Berenice really a witch?
Search me, as this film doesn't seem very sure either. The Toybox was a low budget horror scripted by its director Paolo Sedarazzi, which, as the name Usher might imply, took an Edgar Allan Poe approach to this tale of a family living in East Anglia. Despite the lack of money available, he manages a fairly professional look with adventurous camera moves and computer effects; there's even a few animated sequences as we see the siblings' fantasy world brought to life. After that prologue, the film moves forward to the present day and student Berenice (Claudine Spiteri) has invited her boyfriend Conrad (Craig Henderson) back home for the Christmas holidays.
Conrad is very nervous about seeing his girlfriend's family, but he is reassured that it'll all be fine, a sure sign that it certainly won't be. Once they reach their village destination, he meets the Ushers and they turn out to be a seething cauldron of bitterness and dissatisfaction with each other, which naturally puts Conrad on edge. Brian (Elliott Jordan) has grown up to be a would-be musician who is fixated on his sister, or rather the fantasy world she conjured up which she may or may not believe in, dad tells terrible jokes that nobody laughs at and looks back on a time when everyone sat around the television to watch Russ Abbott, mum is sex-starved and has her eye on Conrad and gran refuses to let the memory of her late husband go.
Unfortunately, the accumulation of all these characters has the effect of being subjected to someone moaning about their terrible relatives for an hour, and suspense is sabotaged by such daft devices as a mystery man leaving sung messages on the answerphone that turns out to be the theme tune to The Russ Abbott Show. In its favour, The Toybox at least tries a few original things, but they may be original because they'd be rejected elsewhere due to their absurdity. Meanwhile, the local vicar is dubbed the creator of zombies and an unshaven bloke hangs around outside with a glowing-eyed dog, but without any explanation of who he is. The antagonism feels authentic, to the extent that the film comes across rather uncomfortably as someone working out their personal issues through the medium of the horror genre. It also features possibly the most instances in film of characters going to the toilet, or announcing their intention to do so. Music by Miguel d'Oliveira.
[The Region 2 DVD features a director's commentary as an extra.]
